(written on December 10th from notes taken yesterday. So much happened, that I don’t know if I’m getting the order of events exact.)
I got up, got my muesli breakfast soaking and spent some more time cleaning up trash around the parking area.
Ate my breakfast and then headed down to pick up the trash around the tubs. Gratefully, there wasn’t much. 🙏
I don’t remember noticing how absolutely covered in algae the tubs were last night. Maybe I noticed? Maybe I didn’t?
I don’t remember.
Either way, I decided I was going to clean them. 🙃
So I grabbed a bottle of soda, a bag of chips, the bathtub scrubbing brush that came with a van, for whatever reason, and headed down, leaving the trash bag full of trash next to my van.
I’ve had this idyllic image of New Zealand in my brain for so long that I’m saddened when I realize that New Zealand is just like most other places, people purposely litter, purposely cause damage, purposely put graffiti on things and carve their names into the wood or stone or whatever it is.
I don’t remember it last time? But clearly, it didn’t all of the sudden just to happen in the last 3 years.
I want to have that idyllic image of New Zealand be true, but it’s just… not.
I guess maybe I just think that with a country that is so beautiful everyone would want to take care of it because it’s so amazing?
Unfortunately, that’s just naive. There will perhaps always be those who selfishly treat people and places with disrespect.
😕
With the trash cleaned up, I turned my attention to the hot tubs, green with significant algae buildup, especially the upper one.
I noticed that there were little drain valves next to each tub, so I drained the water down a handful of inches in the lower tub to scrub what was newly exposed to air. Once scrubbed, I would drain the water down a little more, and repeat the process.
The walls of the tub were not as thickly coated with algae on the lower tub (there were two tiers for the two different tubs). Maybe people used the lower one more, so it didn’t have as much time to build up algae?
The algae on the walls of the upper tub was thick. They were both pretty covered in algae, but the upper one was quite a bit worse, at least on the walls.
After spending a little bit of time on the lower one, I switched up and started working on the upper one, thoroughly scrubbing the walls until they were nice and clean.
The bottom wasn’t dirty in the same way as the sides were, probably because of all the people who step into it, wiping away the algae with their feet as they move around.
There were, however, dark raised spots all over the bottoms, significantly more on the lower tub than the upper tub, which… seems odd, as it seems like the lower tub was the one that was used more frequently?
The dark spots seemed like super-compacted algae that you couldn’t just scrape away easily. To scrape it off, you had to get some sort of tool, a hard fingernail (which doesn’t stay hard for very long when it’s submerged in water 😅) or some piece of plastic that could scrape but not scratch the tub surface.
It was really hot work. I’m guessing the water was maybe something like 120°?
Certainly hotter than a hot tub.
After probably about 2 hours of cleaning, a fair bit of the lower tub and then a lot of, my right hand, which had done pretty much all of the cleaning, felt like it was sunburned from all the exposure to the hot water.
With the sun out, and being summer time, I was cooking from the sun above and from the hot water and humid air below.
Despite dripping sweat constantly, it was good for me to be there.
I was performing a service that would benefit others in the future, making the experience at the hot tubs that much nicer with no trash and clean tubs, and I also had my cell phone playing scriptures in the background that I was listening to while cleaning.
It’s good for me to be here without cell and internet reception, no way to get distracted by sports or TV or movies or any of the other addictions, more and less destructive, that I use to escape fear and pain but that waste my precious life.
After maybe two or three hours of cleaning, I was so hot and sweaty and nasty that I stopped for a while, headed down to the river, and cooled off.
The trail down to the river goes probably 100 or 200 meters further down then where the hot water spring comes down, so I crossed the river to the other side because the bank was too steep and the river too deep and swift to try and swim up the river the hot tub side, and I walked up the opposite river bank to the point where I could see the Hot springs coming down the hillside and meeting the river.
I went a little further upriver from that point because the current was so swift that I wouldn’t be able to just swim straight across, and then I waded out and then started to swim across, expecting The current to take me to my desired destination.
And boy did it!
Once I got to the swiftist part of the current, there was no more swimming necessary, as I was propelled through the water around the bend very quickly, right toward the rocky bank.
It was quick enough that I was a little nervous for the impact (to be transparent, it was moving quickly enough that I was even a little nervous to start swimming across anyway 🙃). But, as I have learned through previous experience, if I just let myself float with my feet as high as I can get them out in front of me, facing downstream, then I’m much less likely to have issues. I’ll generally avoid knocking my shins against any rocks that I can’t see because my feet are up (though I might meet them with my butt 🙃), and I’m much safer, especially in really swift water, as my feet and legs can’t get caught in any unseen logs or branches leaving me pinned against the logs or branches unable to escape because of the sheer power of the swift current and the large volume of water.
I didn’t feel like risking drowning by keeping my legs down, even though there’s the temptation to see where the bottom is. 🙃
I still remember the experience I had on a boy scout rafting trip as one of the adult leaders, as we were coming through what I think was maybe a class 4 rapid, three of us in a canoe got overturned, and I went into the water falling on my back, head down stream. I was quickly sucked underwater and felt my left leg find its way into a crevice in a rock.
There was so much water, and it was so forceful, that had my leg gotten wedged in that crevice, my body probably would have been stuck there until the water was low enough later in the season to retrieve. I don’t think anyone would have ever even seen it but would have been looking for my body miles downstream.
Fun adventures. 🙃
After figuring out that the springs came out in a place where it was unreasonable to hope to build a little hot tub right next to the river where you can jump back and forth between the hot and cold, I popped back in the water, careful not to let my head go below water, remembering the warnings about the brain-eating amoebas in the hot springs and not knowing if the same brain-eating amoebas can survive once they hit the cold water.
I suppose it’s possibly similar with your eyes and ears, don’t let potentially contaminated water get in any orifice of the head?
I don’t know, and I have no reception out here to learn and find out. 🙃
Fortunately, my concerns from yesterday I’ve been alleviated, as I haven’t shown any weird symptoms. Not that I know exactly what to expect, but I’ve heard that symptoms appear really quickly if you have actually gotten an amoebic infection.
After getting back to the van, I got my backpack and sunscreen and what not and headed back down to the tubs to continue cleaning, as it was my goal to have them completely cleaned by the end of the day.
I had no idea how much work that was actually going to require. 😅
Oh! I forgot to mention that I also spent time draining and filling the tubs to time how long it took to drain them and how long it took to fill them back up, hoping to be able to provide that information in a Google review of the place for people to be able to read after getting back to reception.
There was a New Zealand couple (John and Caroline) that pulled up and was getting ready to walk down to the hot tubs as I was gathering my stuff together to head back down again.
I ended up getting down to the tubs about the same time that they did, and we started chatting as I began cleaning again.
Gratefully, John, found that there was a little valve to completely shut the water off from even going into the tubs. That allowed me to fill the upper tub that I was almost finished cleaning for them while draining pretty much all the water except a trickle from the lower tub, allowing me to start cleaning again without being constantly exposed to the really hot water.
The water was too hot for John and Caroline to get in right away, so after filling it up and cutting off the supply of fresh hot water to the tub, they hung around waiting for the water to cool off a bit.
While they waited, we chatted about all sorts of things, New Zealand, life in New Zealand, politics in New Zealand, Life in the United States, politics in the United States.
It seems pretty clear that they hadn’t had many, if any, opportunities to speak to an American and ask questions about life in the United States.
As I kept cleaning, I had lots of ideas come to mind as to what could be done to reduce the maintenance of the place and make for a better experience for those visiting it.
For example, I recognized that it would the tubs would stay cleaner and even last longer if they were kept with the drains draining when not in active use.
This would improve the situation in multiple different ways. 1) Algae wouldn’t grow on the walls because they wouldn’t be wet the vast majority of the time. They would dry out, and the algae wouldn’t be able to grow when not in use. That would significantly reduce the amount of maintenance by preventing the overwhelming majority of the algae from even growing in the first place, which 2) would also improve the experience for others to be able to have a tub to get in that wasn’t covered in algae. 3) with the pipes left flowing into the tubs, but the drains open, it also meant that, at least for the lower tub, the debris (tee tree needles, leaves, and the bugs, etc) would get washed down the drain instead of collecting inside the tub, which would make it so that visitors wouldn’t have to either sit with a bunch of debris in the tub or clean it out upon arrival before being able to fill it up if they wanted to clean tub.
Unfortunately, the placement of the Phil pipe in the upper tub precluded the ability of the water flow to flush any debris down the drain because the pipe was so close to the drain that the current would allow any debris to get back to the drain.
Instead, the debris in the upper tub gets swirled into a collection at the middle as the current goes all around the outside without allowing the debris to ever make it back to the drain.
After finishing cleaning the walls of the lower tub, I set my sites on the dark, raised spots on the bottom of the tub.
Man, those were hard to clean.
After spending probably two hours cleaning nearly everything but the spots on the bottom and in the corners around the sides of the bottom and what not, I probably spent another six hours cleaning the bottoms of the tubs.
It was like algae that had been super duper compacted. The only way to clean it was to get something that could scrape the bottom without damaging the bottom. My fingernails were only useful to a certain degree. In the end, I ended up using the soda bottle cap, putting it on my thumb like a thimble, and just scraping scraping scraping scraping.
For hours. 😅
I chatted with John and Caroline for probably a couple hours before they got in the upper tub for the first time, it taking that long just to cool down even a tiny bit (The sun was out and beating directly down on the tubs, so that probably didn’t help. 😅)
Caroline offered to help clean the tubs a couple of times, but I didn’t want their relaxing first trip to the tubs to be the hot and sweaty mess that I was in the middle of. 🙃 So I politely declined.
It was wonderful to talk to a local couple. I love talking to the people who actually live their lives day to day in the country that I visit. So informative and interesting, and it’s fun just to get to know the people.
We kept talking and talking and talking while I scraped away at the bottom of the lower tub, making slow but steady progress.
Gratefully, I remembered to take before pictures, at least some. 🙏
After we said our goodbyes, I kept cleaning.
And cleaning… 🙃
Eventually, another person came down, a young man by the name of Simon from Bavaria region of Germany who had recently graduated high school and was taking a year off before going to university.
He and I chatted for a little while, and I explained about the tubs, both of them completely empty at this point.
After chatting for a bit, he said he was going to go eat some dinner and then come back down, so I switched from working on the lower tub to finishing the upper tub, after which I filled it up and then cut the water supply completely, so it could be cooling off for when he came back.
I continued listening to scriptures and then atheist arguments and theist arguments from YouTube videos that I had previously downloaded to listen to later while I went back to work on the lower tub.
I think when all was set and done, I had spent probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 8 hours cleaning those darn tubs. 😅
Significantly dehydrated, and recognizing how dehydrated I was (starting to get a headache), having sweat profusely pretty much most of the day, I finally pulled myself away, calling it good enough, and headed up to my van to get something to eat and liquid to hydrate myself with.
I was gathering up food when I saw Simon coming back, so we walked back down to the tubs together, chatting while I ate, and while he dipped his legs in the hot water, which, unfortunately, hadn’t cooled off enough.
Caroline said something that I think is pretty accurate. I think if you want to really enjoy the hot tub experience, you need to come the night before, fill it up, shut the water off completely so no new hot water is coming into it, and then let it cool off overnight and enjoy it in the morning.
Since I had spent so much time cleaning that it had gotten on toward dusk with the sun going behind the hills, the sand flies started coming out–lots of them.
I forgot to mention that. They had started coming out while I was still cleaning before I went back down with Simon. With my long sleeve shirt and long pants and sun hat on, I had managed to keep from getting bitten mostly. But in the little tiny gap between my pant legs at my ankles and my water shoes, periodically, there would be enough space for a sand flight to get in and give you a nice little bite.
Those little suckers are really something. It actually leads to blood coming out of the cuts they slice in you. 🙃
Obviously not a lot of blood, but little dots of blood. Not like mosquitoes. These little buggers actually cut you and then drink the blood that comes out, so you definitely feel it when they actually finally.
Unfortunately, whatever chemical that they put on you happens at the same time that they bite, so you can’t just brush them away and avoid the itch. If you feel the bite, it’s already too late.
At some point, getting tired of the bites around my ankles, I had the idea to tuck my sweatpants into my ankles, which helped a bit more, but I still got bites here and there.
It’s interesting to me that they weren’t going after my face and neck at all. Not complaining 🙃, but definitely interesting. Only very daring ones would go after my hands, so I did eventually get a bite or two on my fingers when I wasn’t paying attention.
Once it was almost dark, I invited Simon to go with me down to the river, as I was soaked from sweat from the day and wanted to take a little bit of a bath and rinse my clothes out (I.E. Go swimming with my clothes on like I always do. 🙃)
It’s so hard to gear myself up for doing laundry when I have come to a point in my life where I’m comfortable just jumping in the river with my dirty clothes and having both them and me come out smelling like a fresh mountain river. 🙃
Doing laundry just seems like such a waste of time after living this kind of lifestyle. 😆
I think I was born to be a mountain man. 🧔♀️
I let Simon borrow one of my headlamps, and we walked down to the river, chatting and staying in the water until we were both pretty cold, before heading back to the hot spring tubs briefly to get his stuff, and then bidding each other a good night.
I listened to some more of the educational YouTube videos that I had saved (atheist and theist perspectives), took some notes for the day for journal prep, and then called it a night.
Love to all.
Lift the world.
Bring it on.
~ stephen
Lift the World 